Preliminary thermal–hydraulic core design of the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR)

• Thermal–hydraulics design of a MSFR core.
• Computation Fluid Dynamic (CFD) modelling.
• Optimization of the geometry of the MSFR core cavity.
• Fuel salt temperature and velocity distributions.
• Sensitivity of the salt flow distribution to the reactor operating parameters.

A thermal–hydraulics study of the core of the Molten Salt Fast Reactor (MSFR) is presented. The numerical simulations were carried-out using a Computation Fluid Dynamic code. The main objectives of the thermal–hydraulics studies are to design the core cavity walls in order to increase the overall flow mixing and to reduce the temperature peaking factors in the salt and on the core walls. The results of the CFD simulations show that for the chosen core design acceptable temperature distributions can be obtained by using a curved core cavity shape, inlets and outlets. The hot spot temperature is less than 10 °C above the average core outlet temperature and is located in the centre of the top wall of the core. The results show also a moderate level of sensitivity to the working point.